Not ripples exactly,
tiny waves from somewhere near the center
calming down, arriving. Here the reeds
are filling up the shoreline year by year.
Trout glimmer in the shallows when the sun
breaks through. Rain-soaked and soggy, the bank brims
with the soft light greens of moss, new grass, and ferns,
all dappled in the summer light that beams
through birches so the ground’s wet plumage looks
white-spotted like the back of a loon. The lake
swallows the sky; the sky fills up the lake,
the blackened bronze of it, with blue and white.
A gull glides deep inside it like a blade.
A trout plucks the surface: circles, visual sound.
Step in. At first the burning, then the slick
muck of leaves and things from seasons past.
It takes your foot, your ankle, calf, the water
rising as you wade out gradually
until it’s just below your groin. A quick
breath and you’re waist-deep. The lake stands still,
sharpening the edges of the clouds,
and all around, the woods go on for miles.
Drop down and let the water take your chest,
your neck, the brilliant cold awakening
your body, your mind in the mosquito haze
a white moth fluttering down to that false sky.
—
Will Toedtman lives in Cincinnati, Ohio. He is the author of The Several World, winner of the Wick Poetry Chapbook Prize. His poems have also appeared in Able Muse, The Hopkins Review, Literary Matters, and elsewhere.
